Between Time and Time
by Sister Coyote
Summary: Luxord and the power of time. Luxord, Demyx. Character study.


Time didn't flow uniformly across the worlds. The Organization learned that early, when Zexion visited the Manifold Seas for what he perceived to be merely a day but which was over a week to the rest of the Organization. In the World that Never Was, time flowed erratically as compared to the other worlds—the World had no real things, only leftovers, discards: borrowed time, stolen time. Luxord's arrival helped to settle them, fitting the broken fragments of chronology together like a jigsaw, though he never revealed whether it was some conscious skill or simply a side-effect of the master of Time living in the castle.

He rarely chose to emphasize his powers. Many of the others thought of him primarily as a dissolute, a gambler, an unambitious hedonist; unlike the others, who either tried (like Saïx) to mimic the Apprentices, or who tried (like Marluxia) to shake off their defining hold on the Organization, Luxord simply didn't care. (In that way Demyx was perhaps closest to him; but Demyx was too eager to please to feign convincing nonchalance.) So the others often forgot that he could bend time, slow it or speed it, halt it, reverse it—with effort, yes, but he could do it—well, that was no terrible thing. It meant they plotted against one another and left him to his own devices.

Demyx was a pleasure to be around because he was obedient but not ambitious; Xigbar was a pleasure to be around because he was so supremely and casually confident in his position as Number Two that he did not feel the need to prove something, most of the time. And there were other reasons they were a pleasure to be around . . . and everything to do with the hard angles of the intersection between time and space, the delicate interaction between time and music.

It was always all about time. Time and chance: but time first, because at the heart of mastering chance was knowing how to choose your time.

And just as Demyx preferred to visit Atlantica, and Vexen had a particular liking for the Land of Snow, Luxord felt most . . . at home where someone was celebrating the passage of time.

They sat on the high ridge of the rooftop, above a square where, far below, people stamped their feet to keep warm and drank hot cider from a cauldron over a bonfire. The wind skirled snowflakes and tugged at their robes, but Luxord was not cold: as if in recompense for the lack of a heart, the body of a Nobody was an unusually tough thing, and the cloaks and gloves kept him warm.

"What are we waiting for?" Demyx asked after a while. He had come because he was easy to convince—not stupid, and more perceptive than he looked, like water clear but deep, but eager to please and easy to convince. (Xigbar had laughed and said that he had better things to do with an evening than freeze his ass off watching some backwater celebration.)

"Shh," Luxord said. "Just watch."

Demyx folded his arms across his knees and rested his chin on the place where his glove-clad wrists crossed. In the square below, people bought packets of hot roasted nuts and papers full of candy twists, but there was not the music and dancing that accompanied most celebrations. Not yet. Expectation lay on the air like a pelt, thick and muffling.

The bells of the belltower began to toll, the sound rolling like a tangible thing, and the air of expectation increased until Luxord thought that he could take it in his hands and shape it. One. Two. "There," he said. "That's what they're waiting for." Three. Four. "The time between year and year—as the bell tolls, the moment when it is neither this year nor next." Five. Six. Seven. "Why celebrate the new year, after all?" Eight. Nine. "Gratitude for being alive another year?" Ten. Eleven.

"Why else?" Demyx asked. Twelve. The moment crackled and broke, and Luxord reeled it in, easy as the passage from tick to tock.

Down in the square, the crowd erupted in pandemonium. Now there was music, dancing—but Luxord had lost interest. They were not thinking about the hour, anymore. "Something else," he said. How to explain it, the power of the between-time moments, the celebration of the passing of time? "Never mind. We should go."

He would entertain Demyx—who was looking at him, bemused—with cards, and brandy; he might invite Xigbar as well. They didn't understand, but that was all right. He held the moment between time and time close and careful under his ribs.


End file.
